Duckling Ugly

by Neal Shusterman

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  She left, not all that sure that I was.

  I’m so stupid—it’s just three words, I told myself. Why should three words have such control over me? It was like some sort of magic spell.

  Then I got to thinking about what Miss Leticia had said about words, letters having a magic to them when they were in the right order. Spells and spelling are one in the same. Spelling. Letters. The idea struck me at dinner one night so suddenly, I dropped my spoon right into my soup, and it splashed across the table, right into Vance’s eye.

  “Hey!”

  “Excuse me.” I got up, dinner suddenly forgotten, and went to my room, locking my door. My parents didn’t question it, since I did it so often. Maybe they were glad to have me gone from the table. It was breakfast that Mom was determined to make a family meal. By the time dinner rolled around, she was too tired to care.

  The second my door was locked, I went to my desk, pulled the note out of my pocket, and set it on my desk. Then I took out a piece of paper, my brush and ink. I let the tip of the brush soak in the silky blackness, then I closed my eyes, trying to feel a connection to the words. From my mind to my hand, to my fingers, to the tip of the brush. Then I opened my eyes and wrote in smooth simple strokes:

  FIND THE ANSWERS

  Even before I took the next step, I could sense I was onto something. It wasn’t just the words, it was the letters. The letters and the spaces between. It was the spelling. It was the spell. I took the letters and began writing them down in different combinations.

  FIND THE ANSWERS

  DITHERS IN WRENF

  STAINED WN FRESH

  TRAIN WEDNES SHF

  RAINS WHEN FEETS

  THERE WINS FANDS

  WHERE FINS STAND

  That gave me a moment’s pause. “Where Fins Stand.” It didn’t make any sense, yet somehow it sounded familiar. I searched my mind for the meaning, but I couldn’t grab anything from those words. Still, there was some connection.

  FIND THE ANSWERS…WHERE FINS STAND…

  I shook my head to shake the thought loose and kept on playing with the letters, but no other combinations stood out in my mind. Eventually, I had to face the fact that I was on a wild-goose chase. As sure as I was that there was something hidden in those letters, logic told me to forget it. I closed the ink and crumpled the paper.

  As for what happened next, well, I should have been smart enough to see it coming—or at least to step out of the way before I was hit. But I was so obsessed with figuring out the note, I never saw all the forces around me coming together. It wasn’t so much a conspiracy of things as it was separate events weaving themselves together into a net that snared me sure as an animal trap.

  The next day was a bad one. For one, all that time I’d been spending obsessing over the note kept me from studying, so I failed a math test. Then at lunch Gerardo spent the whole time talking about Nikki, and how good things were between the two of them. Well, they say bad news comes in threes—and when I got home on that day, I found my dad sitting on the sofa, across from none other than bad news number three: Marshall Astor, Marisol’s boyfriend and accomplice in crime. My heart took a long, slow fall into my gut.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Cara, honey,” Dad said, standing up, “that’s no way to talk to a guest.”

  “That’s no guest, that’s vermin. I’ll get the rat poison.”

  Dad laughed nervously. “She’s got a biting sense of humor, doesn’t she? You two talk. I got some, um, business I have to take care of.” Dad was out of that house at light speed.

  I looked around, hoping Momma and Vance were there. Anything to keep me from being alone with Marshall, but they were nowhere to be found.

  “So what do you want?” I asked. His foot was no longer bandaged, though he did still walk with a little bit of a limp. “If you want me to testify against Leticia Radcliffe, forget it.”

  “What? Oh. No, I never told nobody about that.” I saw his toes wiggle in the tip of his shoes. He grimaced, and that just made me smile. I didn’t usually enjoy other people’s pain, but for Marshall Astor, I’d make an exception.

  “Ruined your football season, I’ll bet.”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t play anyway. I was already on academic probation.”

  I crossed my arms, making it clear I was done with the small talk. “So what do you want?”

  “There’s no point in beating around the bush,” he said. “I’ll just say it straight out. I’m asking you to the homecoming dance.”

  It caught me so off guard I just laughed out loud.

  “I’m not making a joke,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  “You think I’m gonna fall for that? What are you gonna do, wait till I get all dressed up and pour a bucket of blood on me? Sorry, I saw that movie.”

  “Nah, that’s gross,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Oh, but it’s not too gross to fill someone’s room with roadkill?”

  “I had nothing to do with that!” he said. Then he hesitated. “Well, okay, I did help Marisol scoop up the roadkill, but I didn’t know what she was going to use it for.”

  I just looked at him in disbelief.

  “I didn’t!” he said. “I thought she had got it into her head that they needed a decent burial, or something. I didn’t know she was gonna do what she did! I didn’t find out until after.”

  I wasn’t sure who was more of a fool—him for saying something like that, or me for actually believing him.

  “So you’re telling me Marisol has nothing to do with you asking me to the dance?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not Marisol’s idea at all. In fact, she’s pretty mad about it.”

  “Is that so?” Anything that made Marisol mad was fine by me—but I wasn’t foolish enough to think Marshall was doing this out of the kindness of his microscopic heart.

  “If it’s not a Marisol scheme, then you must be doing it on a dare.”

  He shook his head. “You’re so sure you’re completely undatable—well, maybe you’re not. Maybe there are some decent things about the way you look.”

  “Name one.”

  He panicked for a moment, looking me up and down, trying to find something. Finally, he said, “You…uh…you’ve got nice hands.”

  Hah! Even if it were true, it wouldn’t have made me believe his intentions. “I see right through you!” I told him. “You’ve got some secret reason for wanting to take me, and I want to know what it is!”

  Suddenly he got all mad. He picked up a pillow and he threw it down hard. “Why do you gotta ask? Can’t you just accept the invitation and leave it at that?”

  Then I thought of Gerardo. I never even went so far as to imagine him inviting me to the dance, because I knew he was going with Nikki Smith. I tried to imagine myself with Marshall Astor, and I simply couldn’t. “Who says I even want to go with you?”

  He laughed—as if any girl in the world would be a fool to turn down an invitation from him. “You know what they say, Cara. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I thought he might make some crack about me looking like the gift horse, but he didn’t.

  “I only promise you two things,” Marshall said. “One: This is not a trick. No one’s gonna do anything bad to you, or they will answer to me. And two: You will have a good time.”

  “And how can you be so sure of that?”

  Marshall smiled his winning smile. “Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to show a girl a good time.”

  And then he strutted out like so much peacock.

  After he left, I stormed into my room, slamming the door, even though no one was there to hear it. I just liked the sound of hearing it slam. Nice hands, he had said. That was the best thing he could say about me, and even that was a lie. I was a nail-biter. More than that, I bit the skin around my nails, so both my hands always looked like a war zone.

  But then I looked at my hands, and
I realized that maybe Marshall was a bit more observant than me…because my fingertips weren’t gnawed on at all. My nails were smooth, my cuticles were smooth. It looked as if I had just had a hundred-dollar manicure. It was impossible, because I’d been biting my nails more than ever. And yet they were perfect.

  Like magic.

  I gasped, and reached into my pocket, pulling out the shimmering note. I had been running my fingertips over its soft texture day after day, and my fingers had been healed. Repaired. Beautified. It was definitely a hint of something magical and mystical, but how far it went—how deep it went, was still a mystery.

  “I’m not going.”

  “What do you mean you’re not going?”

  My momma was practically on her hands and knees, begging. “He is the handsomest boy in your grade, and if he’s taken a liking to you—”

  “He hasn’t taken a liking to me,” I told her. “Face it; there’s something else going on here.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Well, how do you know he isn’t into ugly girls?”

  The very concept completely derailed my train of thought.

  “In this world,” my momma said, “there is a man for every woman. You go to the mall, you look at people. Half the time they look so mismatched you wonder what’s going on. But to them, they fit perfectly.”

  Vance sat in the recliner just enjoying the whole thing. Dad was in the kitchen, pretending not to listen, but I know he was.

  “What are you gonna do for the rest of your life, Cara?” Momma asked. “You gonna lock yourself in your room? You gonna climb out that window and go walk around the cemetery your whole life?”

  I snapped my eyes to her.

  “You think I don’t know you do that? I know every time you climb out that window, but I never say anything because I figure you’ve got a right to do the things you do.”

  “Fine. And I have a right not to go with Marshall anywhere,” I said, but my resolve was failing. Then I got to thinking, if this whole thing wasn’t some scheme of Marisol’s, and if she truly didn’t want Marshall to take me, then how could I pass up this chance to make her miserable? I thought about Gerardo, too. He’d be there with Nikki. Certainly, she wouldn’t stand for him dancing with most other girls, but what about me? If Gerardo danced with me, would Nikki see that as him being noble? I could swallow my pride and pretend to be some social charity case if it meant Gerardo would dance with me. Then again, would he even ask? I’d never know if I stayed home.

  I think Momma knew I was on the verge of giving in, because she got quiet. Serious.

  “Honey, life does not throw you many opportunities,” Momma said. “Don’t go and squander the ones you get.”

  “But I don’t like Marshall Astor.”

  “You don’t have to,” Momma told me.

  And the look in her eyes when she said it struck home, because I knew she wasn’t talking about me and Marshall. She was talking about her and Dad.

  There were good things I could say about my momma and bad things. But the sadness I saw in her right then made me feel selfish thinking about myself.

  “Go and be happy, Cara,” Momma said. “I need you to be happy.”

  That fence I was sitting on had become too uncomfortable, so I finally jumped off. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  I didn’t tell Gerardo. I had planned to, but then he started talking all about how he and Nikki were going to the dance, and he asked me what I thought he should wear. After that, I didn’t want to talk about it. No matter what awful fate awaited me at that party, it would be worth it to see the look on Gerardo’s face when I walked in with Marshall!

  9

  B-E-T-R-A-Y-A-L-S

  The day before homecoming, Nikki went to get her teeth cleaned, determined that if she couldn’t outshine the likes of Marisol and her beauty-queen friends, she could at least outsmile them. While Nikki’s motormouth was being worked over, Gerardo had the afternoon free. So I took him to Vista View to meet Miss Leticia.

  “This here’s a good girl,” Miss Leticia told him. “You treat her right, you hear?”

  Gerardo put up his hands. “Hey, I’m not gonna treat her at all.”

  “Well,” said Miss Leticia, “that’s fine, too.”

  Miss Leticia seemed worried about something today. She wasn’t saying anything, but it was right there in her body language.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I’m fine. I got my son and that wife o’ his comin’ over tomorrow, and they always set me on edge.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions. Miss Leticia had told me how, every time they come over, they bring brochures from nursing homes—not good ones, but the cheap ones that give you a room, a bed, and, if you’re lucky, something edible once in a while. The kind of place you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Okay, maybe your worst enemy, but no one else.

  “Maybe the corpse flower will bloom and chase them away,” I suggested.

  She laughed at that. “Maybe so, maybe so. It sure is gettin’ ready.”

  “The what flower?” asked Gerardo.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Miss Leticia went inside, leaving us to walk through the greenhouse. There was a sour smell in the air, like dirty socks, as we got close to the corpse flower. Its stalk was now almost six feet high. You could see the crack where the flower would start to unfurl. “When it blooms it smells like dead bodies,” I told him.

  “Cool,” he said. “I hope she opens up the doors so the whole town gets a whiff. The ultimate stink bomb!”

  I thought it would be perfect if we were holding hands as we walked among the plants, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Still, I tried to keep my hands in full view, hoping he’d notice how nice they’d been looking. He didn’t, but he did make another observation.

  “You know, I don’t know why they call you the Flock’s Rest Monster,” Gerardo said. “There’s nothing monstrous about you. Except maybe for the way you look, but looks don’t make a monster. It’s the things a person does.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’ve done some pretty monstrous things.”

  “Tell me one.”

  And so I told him all about how I got Marisol expelled from school.

  “Hmm,” said Gerardo when I was done. “Well, you didn’t do anything monstrous at all. Marisol brought that on herself.”

  “So what about you?” I asked him. “What bad things have you done?”

  He looked away from me then, tugged off a loose fern leaf, and fiddled with it.

  “I’ve done some stuff.”

  “Tell me.”

  He kept his eyes on the fern in his hands instead of me.

  I could tell there was something he wanted to say, yet didn’t want to say at the same time. I wondered which part of him would win out.

  “Go on, it’s okay,” I told him.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “But I’ll tell you anyway.” He took a deep breath. “You know, I almost got expelled, too. It was last year. They weren’t just going to expel me, they were going to send me to juvie.”

  “I didn’t know that.” And then I asked as gently as I could, “What did you do?”

  “I hacked into the district’s computer. I didn’t change grades or anything. I just got onto the teachers’ Web sites and had some fun. I put pictures of monkeys in place of their faces, stuff like that.”

  I grinned. “I didn’t know you were a computer geek.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not. It’s just a hobby, you know.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” I told him.

  “Yeah.” Then he paused. “I swore I’d never do anything like that again. But about a month ago, your friend Marisol asked me to hack into another computer.”

  “Marisol wanted you to fix up her grades?”

  He shook his head. “No. She wanted me to do something else.”

  I still didn’t get where this was going. Usually, I’m quicker, but not this
time. I just stood there cluelessly waiting to hear what despicable thing Marisol had asked him to do.

  “Anyway, she pulled out a stack of bills from her purse. I don’t know where she got it from. I tell her no, but she keeps peeling off twenties…until I finally say yes.”

  “So what did she ask you to do?”

  He looked at me like I should already know…but when I looked back at him, still clueless, he finally said: “She had me hack into a certain computer, and put in a secret wireless Web connection, so I could control the computer from my laptop…and choose the words it was asking people to spell…”

  It was like getting hit broadside by a truck. You don’t see it coming, and by the time you hear the crunch, it’s too late.

  We sat there for a long time, the sour-sock smell from the corpse plant getting stronger and stronger. We couldn’t look at each other. The silence was so loud, if someone didn’t break it, I felt I’d go deaf. Well, if he wouldn’t do it, then I would.

  “Don’t sit by me in the lunchroom anymore,” I told him.

  “Yeah. Yeah, right,” he said, then he set his hands in his pockets and walked away.

  I felt the breeze as he opened the greenhouse door, then I heard him say, “For what it’s worth, those words I made you spell…I don’t think any of those words apply to you.” Then I heard the door close, leaving me in a cell of captured beauty about to be overwhelmed by the smell of death.

  I started walking home, my mind a storm of bad feelings and bad thoughts. Normally, I would have been able to stand up to this the way I stood up to most everything. I was good at not letting myself get hurt anymore. But this time I’d been careless. I’d become vulnerable, and Gerardo’s betrayal, well, it hurt like a wound so deep it scraped bone.

  I don’t know if you would call what I had a blind fury, but whatever it was, I lost track of where I was, and where I was going. Eventually, I got my feelings under control by thinking of my calming place. The lush valley, the pastel-colored cottages. The sense of belonging. I let it flow over me like a trance as I walked. When I came out of it, it was like waking up after sleepwalking. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings.